She cut the engine in the hospital parking lot and Stiles was off the bike before it had fully stopped, the helmet already in his hands, his eyes already on the entrance.
She stayed where she was.
The sensible thing — the only sensible thing, given everything — was to leave. Peter was still out there. The night wasn't over. She had done what she'd come to do, which was get him here in one piece, and that was the end of her part in this. She had no reason to go inside. She had no reason to be anywhere near this building or the people in it.
She watched him disappear through the automatic doors.
She stayed on the bike.
She lasted approximately forty seconds.
It wasn't a decision, exactly. It was the bond — the specific, constant frequency of him that she had stopped being able to ignore weeks ago — pulling taut the moment the doors closed between them, his agitation coming through sharp and immediate, the quality of it wrong in a way she couldn't name and couldn't leave alone. Peter had promised to leave him alone and had lied. She didn't know what else Peter had planned for tonight. She didn't know if this was over.
She told herself that was why she went in. She told herself that all the way to the elevator.
The doors opened on the third floor.
The lobby was the particular organized chaos of a hospital at night — the specific quality of urgency kept just below the surface, people moving with purpose, the overhead lights too bright for the hour. Stiles was already ahead of her, scanning, and she followed at a distance that she told herself was practical and knew was something else.
She saw the Sheriff before Stiles, talking to him with anger and agitation.
Scarlett stopped.
She stayed back, near the wall, close enough to hear and far enough to be furniture, and looked past them both toward the room beyond the glass.
Lydia.
She was on the bed with the oxygen mask over her face and her hair loose against the pillow, and beside her a woman who had to be her mother was sitting very still with her hands in her lap. Scarlett looked at the girl through the glass and tried to understand what she was looking at.
Why would Peter bite her?
The question had been sitting in her chest since the garage, since Stiles had said the word Lydia with that specific quality of fear, and she still didn't have an answer that made sense. Even if Peter had wanted leverage over Stiles — even if he had wanted to force him somewhere, do something — the bite wasn't leverage. The bite was a gamble. It either took or it killed, and in neither case did you get what you wanted from the person watching.
She had seen it happen once, years ago. The rejection. The blood going dark and wrong, coming from everywhere at once. But she didn't seem to be rejecting the bite.
"Is she gonna be okay?"
Stiles' voice, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
"They don't know." The Sheriff's voice was careful in the specific way of someone managing information. "Partially because they don't know what happened. She lost a lot of blood, but there's something else going on with her."
"What do you mean?"
"The doctors say it's like she's having an allergic reaction. Her body keeps going into shock."
Scarlett looked at Lydia through the glass and thought: that's not right. That wasn't how it worked. Shock wasn't part of it — not like this, not sustained, not cycling. The bite either found something to hold onto or it didn't, and if it didn't the body made that clear very quickly and completely. There was no middle state. There was no allergic reaction.
So what was happening to her?
"Did you see anything?" The Sheriff's voice again. "Do you have any idea who or what attacked her?"
She felt Stiles' fear from where she was standing. Not through distance — it moved through the bond the way it always did, close and immediate, arriving in her chest before she'd consciously processed it. His fear. His worry. The specific texture of his guilt, which was always the hardest one, the one she recognized.
She looked at the floor.
"No," Stiles said. "I have no idea."
"What about Scott?"
"What do you mean?" Stiles asked looking at his father, "What about him?"
"Did he see anything?" The Sheriff asked, his patience getting thiner.
"What do you—" But then something shifted in Stiles' voice. "Is he not here?"
"What are you talking about?" His father argued, "I've been calling him on his cell phone. I've gotten no response."
"Yeah." Stiles muttered quietly, more to himself. "You're not gonna get one."
She was still looking at the floor when the Sheriff moved — she heard the footsteps, the brief exchange with someone at the desk — and when she looked up Stiles was alone in the corridor, his back to her, one hand going to his hair.
She could feel it. The specific agitation of him, the way it moved through the bond like static, like something with nowhere to go. She knew that feeling. She had been carrying a version of it for days.
She pushed off the wall.
"Stiles."
His whole body went rigid before he'd turned around. She felt the anger arrive in him — clean and immediate, the way it always arrived when it had been waiting — and he turned not toward her but away from her, moving into the side corridor with the quick purposeful stride of someone who needed distance more than direction.
"Oh no," he said, not stopping. "Not now."
She followed him.
"Stiles--" She didn't finshed to talk because he suddenly turned. Scarlett's eyes widened in seeing his expression. It was not the careful controlled distance he had put between them on the bike, not even the anger from the parking lot outside the hospital when he found out the truth and not even the sad one when he closed the door of his house after getting back her invitation. This was something rawer and less managed, like he had been holding too many things at once and had just run out of hands.
"What do you even want?" he exclaimed sharply, facing her, "Why are you here? Why did you even help me?"
Her eyes could not move from his face, feeling like she was not able to make up an excuse in front of him anymore. "I just... I don't want to see you get hurt." He shook his head, his gaze hardening.
"He attacked Lydia." He said pointing in the direction they had just came from. "To force me to go with him. Do you know that? Did you know that?"
"What?" The word came out before she could shape it. "No."
His gaze if possible only getting sharper, "Evelyn is missing, you don't know anything about that too?"
Evelyn was missing?
"What?" she asked genuanly confused at that. But he didn't step back.
"Did you tell him to do it?" His voice cracked upward. "Did you tell him to attack Lydia to get to me—"
Scarlett's eyes grew larger as if he was crazy, "I just saved you, Stiles!" She exclaimed.
"Like you haven't done that before." The words landed flat and deliberate, and she felt them the way she felt the silver — not on the surface, somewhere deeper and it hurt twice as more.
"I don't know what you're talking about." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was the only thing she had going for her right now. "I don't know anything about Lydia. I don't know anything about Evelyn."
His jaw tensed, "If you're lying—"
"I'm not lying!" She exclaimed, but that just made him let a dry chuckle.
"He calls you his love and you want me to believe you he doesn't tell you his plans?" He said in and hiss and Scarlett felt her eyes almost sting with tears.
"I didn't know!" The words came out with a force that surprised even her. "God, Stiles! I didn't know!" Why he wasn't believing her? She knew nothing of what was happening that night, she just wanted for Stiles to stop. She just wanted for him to believe her.
"Why should I believe you?" He asked hardly, and Scarlett shook her head.
"You can't! But that's the truth." She exclaimed in his face, her fangs tremble to be released for the nervousness she was feeling, but she kept them in. "It wouldn't be the first time Peter had lied to me," her voice got thiner at that, the thought of Peter lying to her was painful already. Then she looked up at Stiles, her tone getting softer and she searched his eyes, hoping that he would understand.
"I didn't want anything to happen to you." She said looking at him, "I know nothing of Evelyn. And I didn't know— God, why would I be wanting Lydia dead?"
But he wasn't understanding, he wasn't even trying to.
"Why would you be wanting anything, Scarlett?" He exclaimed, making her shiver, "You're not a creature that needs a pack. Vampires don't follow an Alpha. You did it because you enjoyed it. All of it!" He said before taking a step to go away from her, but before she could stop herself, her fangs popped out, and she grabbed his shoulder shoving him against the wall, keeping her hands there so that he could not move.
"Now, you listen to me."
"Let go," Stiles said in an hiss, his human strenght wasn't allowing for him to get away.
"Did I enjoy killing people?" The words came out low and too close and completely direct. "I'm a vampire. That's what I'm supposed to do. But do you know how it started? Do you know how I began?" Her eyes stang again because of the tears that she was desperately trying to keep under control. "I spent years hunting hunters. Every one I could find. And then I kept going. And going. And at some point it had just become — an habit." Something moved in her chest that she chose not to examine. "Yes. I enjoyed killing. I enjoyed hunters. I would kill every single one of them if I could." Her grip on his shoulders loosened but didn't let go. "And I threw all of it away tonight. For you. To save you." The last part left her lips more viciously that she had intended to.
He stared at her.
"Am I supposed to thank you?" The words came out rough and cracked at the edges. "Thank you for not killing me the way you killed other people?"
Anger flared, "They got what they deserved, Stiles!" She exclaimed gripping his arms again, but when she noticed him winch she let him go immediately and her eyes closed feeling that pag of fear in he was feeling.
"You look at me like I'm the monster." She took a breath, her voice quiet and flat, " And maybe I am. But they are too. And they deserved everything that happened to them. For what they do." Her jaw tightened. "For what they did."
The corridor was quiet around them. Somewhere down the hall a monitor beeped its patient rhythm. Stiles hadn't moved.
"All the killings were linked to the fire," he said slowly. Like he was thinking it through as he said it. "The fire — Scott said—" Something shifted in his face. "Scott said you were trapped in that fire."
"Yeah."
The word came out small. Smaller than she'd intended.
She looked at the wall beside his shoulder and breathed in once, slowly, through her nose, and felt the specific weight of what she was about to say settle into her hands, her arms, the particular hollowness behind her sternum that had been there for years and never fully gone away.
"There's a vault under the Hale house." Her voice had changed. She could hear it — the particular quality of a voice that has decided to say something true and is paying the price of it. "A safe place. Or at least we thought it would be." A little sad smile appeared on her face, "I used to play hide and seek there with Cora."
Stiles went very still, but Scarlett didn't look at him as flashes of that night came back in her mind.
"That night — they locked us in." The words came out one at a time, like she was carrying them up from somewhere deep. "All of us. And then they started the fire."
She stopped.
She could hear it. She could always hear it, the way you can always hear something that was loud enough at the right moment — the specific sound of the Hale house burning, the way the screaming had layered over itself, voice over voice, until it was something that didn't have a shape anymore, just a wall of sound that she had pressed herself against in the dark and not been able to get away from.
"I can still hear them." Her voice had gone somewhere quiet, trying to closing her eyes but the image only getting stronger in her head. "
"I can still see it — the fire getting closer, dividing us. We screamed. We tried to get out. But it was—" She pressed her lips together. "There was nothing we could do."
"How... How did you get out?" Stiles' voice came as a whisper, but she heard it clear.
The question landed gently. Gentler than anything he had said in the past ten minutes.
"The same way I came back from the dead." She looked at her hands. "I dug. I kept digging until I was underground, buried, and I could still hear them—" All of them, far but not enough for her to not listen to them, and they were still there, echoing in her head. "And then... I couldn't hear anything anymore." Her voice cracked at that.
The silence that followed had a specific weight. She felt it in her chest, the particular exhaustion of something that had been carried for a long time and set down for the first time in an unfamiliar place.
"I don't know how long I was down there. But when I got out—" She stopped again. "I couldn't see anyone. But I could smell them." Her jaw tightened. "Their bodies. All of them."
Stiles said nothing. She could hear his heartbeat — slower now, the anger settled into something else, something that was listening rather than fighting.
"Why are you telling me this?"
She looked at him then. At his face, which was doing several things at once and none of them simple, and she held his gaze and said the only true thing she had left.
"Because I want you to know what I am." She said feeling a hot tear of blood running down her face. "And why I've done the things I've done. I want you to know that there are other monsters." Something tightened behind her eyes. "I want you to know what she did to us."
Something shifted in his expression. "She?" He took a step toward her. "Who's she?"
Scarlett looked down, and made a step to get away but sis hand caught her arm and she stopped. He was holding her firmly, and yet somehow it was gentle... Another tear went down her cheek.
"Scarlett." His voice had gone somewhere careful and very quiet. "Who's she?"
She looked at his hand on her arm. At the corridor stretching out in both directions, empty and fluorescent and completely indifferent.
"I really didn't know anything about Lydia," she said in a whisper.
She pulled free gently.
And she walked away down the corridor and did not look back, and the sound of the monitor followed her until she turned the corner and then there was nothing but her own footsteps and the cold weight of everything she had just left in the air behind her.
She kept her face down all the way to the elevator.
Her hand came up before she'd decided anything — palm pressed flat against her mouth, fingers curled toward her cheek — and she held it there while the doors opened and closed and the numbers descended and she looked at the floor and did not want to think about anything she had just said in that corridor.
She didn't make it out of the elevator before another tear came and fell on the floor.
Hot, running fast, and she pressed her hand harder against her face and breathed through her nose and told herself to hold it together for thirty more seconds, just thirty more seconds until she was outside, until there was no one to see—
The lobby doors opened and the night air hit her and she crossed the parking lot with her hand still over her mouth and her eyes on the ground, and when she reached the far edge of the lot where the light didn't reach she stopped walking and pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes and let it happen.
It came in waves. The way it always did now — something she still couldn't entirely control, her body insisting on feeling things she didn't have the language for. She cried for the vault, for the smell of smoke that had never entirely left her memory, for the specific sound of voices she had heard every night for eight years going quiet one by one. She cried because she had said it out loud for the first time and it was still true and saying it hadn't made it lighter, just real in a different way.
She cried because Peter had lied to her. Because she had believed him — about Laura, about Stiles, probably about other things she hadn't found the edges of yet — and he had been the only fixed point she had for six years, the only person who had known what she was and stayed anyway, and now she didn't know what that meant or what any of it had been.
She cried because Stiles hadn't believed her.
And because he was right not to. That was the worst part — she couldn't even be angry about it, couldn't make herself feel wronged, because she had done exactly what he thought she was capable of and the only thing that separated tonight from every other night was that this time she hadn't. And this time wasn't enough. This time would never be enough, and she had known that, and she had gone up in that elevator anyway, and told him the thing she had never told anyone, and it hadn't mattered.
She pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth.
There was nothing to be done about it. That was the specific, precise weight of it — not that it hurt, but that it was simply true, with no argument available and no remedy in reach.
She lowered her hand.
She breathed.
She didn't hear them coming.
That was the thing that registered first, underneath everything else — not that there were four of them, not the paletti, not the specific quality of how they were moving. Just that she hadn't heard them, and that was wrong, and her body understood it before her mind did and her fangs were already down when the first one reached her.
She moved.
It came back the way it always did — not thought, just the clean automatic geometry of it, her body remembering everything it had ever learned about how to do this. She caught the first hunter's arm before the stake had finished its arc, turned his momentum against him, sent him into the second one with enough force that they both went down. The third came from her left and she ducked under his reach and drove her elbow up and felt the impact travel all the way to her shoulder and didn't stop moving.
They were good. She registered that with the detached professional corner of her mind that always ran underneath the rest of it in moments like this. Trained, coordinated, they had done this before.
She was better.
She put the fourth one on the ground with a move that used the car door behind him and turned to check her work — all four down, all four breathing — and something closed around her throat.
The silver hit like fire.
Not the contact burn she had felt with the garrote in the school bathroom, not the specific localized wrong of the wire at her neck. This was complete and immediate, flooding up through her jaw and into the back of her skull and down through her shoulders, and her hands went to her throat on instinct and found the wire already cutting in, and her back hit someone's chest and her legs went unreliable and she understood, with the cold clarity of oxygen leaving a room, that she was not getting out of this one quickly.
"I was wondering where you were."
She knew the voice. She had heard it before.
Chris Argent.
"Where's the Alpha?"
The silver was burning through the skin at her throat in slow concentric rings, and she pressed her lips together and breathed through it and said, "I don't — I don't know." The words came out broken by the pain. "I don't know."
"You don't know." His voice was completely level. "And where's Scott?"
She shook her head.
"I don't know that either."
He made a small sound — not quite a sigh, something more considered than that. "It's hard to believe, vampire. You're always with him." A pause that had the quality of a decision being made. "But I also know someone else who might be useful."
The cold that moved through her had nothing to do with the silver.
Stiles.
"Leave him out of this." The words tore out of her before she could stop them, and the wire pulled tighter in response, and she made a sound she immediately regretted.
"I need Scott McCall." His voice was quiet. Completely certain. "And if you're not useful for that, you'll be useful for his best friend."
She almost laughed. It came out wrong, through the pain, more of a grimace than anything else, but she held onto it because it was the only thing she had.
"He won't care." Her voice was rough, the wire making every word cost something. "He won't tell you anything to save me."
"We'll see about that."
The silver chains came next.
She hated silver more than almost anything — the specific way it shut her down completely, not just the pain but the helplessness of it, her body refusing to respond the way it should. They walked her inside with her arms bound and the garrote still at her throat and she went because she had no choice and catalogued every detail of the route because she would have one, eventually.
The room they put her in was small and institutional and smelled like old concrete. Two hunters on either side, chains holding her arms away from her body, the silver doing its slow steady work on her skin. She breathed through it. Measured her options. Found them limited.
The door opened.
She heard them before she saw them — the stumble of two people pushed off balance, the impact of a body against something metal. Then Stiles' voice, surprised and sharp, and she looked up.
He and Jackson were picking themselves up from where they'd been shoved against the bed frame. Jackson's eyes were wide and confused in the specific way of someone who had been having a very bad night and had just discovered it could get worse.
"Stiles—"
He heard his name in her voice and turned.
His eyes found her. The chains. The burns at her throat and wrists, still red and wrong. The blood on her cheeks she hadn't been able to stop.
"Scarlett." His voice came out strange — not the flat careful distance from the corridor, something less managed than that.
Jackson turned and stared. He said nothing for once, which was probably the most useful thing he had done all night.
But what the fuck is he doing here? Scarlett thought looking at him.
She was already pulling against the chains before she had decided to — her body responding to the sight of Chris Argent's hand closing around Stiles' arm, moving toward something that immediately hit the wall of the silver and went nowhere. She felt the burn intensify and stopped.
"Wait." Her own voice, sharp and immediate. "I'll tell you what I know. I'll tell you whatever you want. Just let him go."
Chris looked at her. Then at Stiles, who's eyes were bigger as she spoke. Then back at her, with the specific expression of someone recalibrating a variable.
"A vampire can't be trusted," he said.
She felt her body pull tight against the chains anyway, useless and furious, as he turned back to Stiles, pushing him against the wall.
She watched it happen from across the room with the silver holding her in place and the chains doing the rest and nothing available to her except the watching. She watched Chris walk Stiles through the story about the rabid dog and she watched Stiles hold himself together with the particular stubborn composure that had always been the most recognizable thing about him and she watched him deflect and redirect and refuse to give anything away.
And then Stiles looked at her.
One second, across the room, while Chris was still talking. The look asked something she didn't have an answer for and she held it anyway.
"Did Scott try to kill you on the full moon?"
"Yeah, I did. I had to handcuff him to a radiator." Stiles said, before his gaze sharpened as he looked at the man.
"Why? Would you prefer I locked him in the basement and burned the whole house down around him?"
Her eyes went wide before she could stop them.
Something shifted in Chris Argent's face — complicated, fast, gone before she could name it.
"I hate to dispel a popular rumor, Stiles, but we never did that."
Lier, Scarlett thought with anger.
"Oh, right. " Stiles said firmly, "Derek said you guys had a Code. I guess no one ever breaks it."
"Never." Chris Argent answered.
"What if someone does?" Stiles challenged him, and it seemed that he was working, because the man turned to him.
"Someone like who?"
"Your sister." Scarlett's let out a breath at Stiles words. He had believed her, and He knew... he knew it was Kate... he had figured it out. "Scarlett was there." Stiles said quietly, looking at her, "She's one of the survivors."
The room went quiet in a specific way.
Chris Argent turned to look at her. She held his gaze and did not look away.
"Did she tell you that?" His voice was careful as he glared at her, who showed her fangs. "Do you trust a vampire?"
"No, I don't trust a vampire." Stiles' voice was firm, " But I know she was there. And I know what your sister did." Then he took a moment, his eyes finding hers for a moment, "I guess monsters aren't the only monsters after all."
Stiles... she thought as another tear went down her face.
Something moved through Chris Argent's face that she had never expected to see there.
"She really did it?"
She looked at him. At the specific quality of his stillness — the stillness of someone who has been carrying a question for a long time and is suddenly very close to an answer they might not want.
"She went around asking how to do it." Her voice came out flat and direct. "She got the people who helped her to lock us in. The people the Alpha killed. And I helped him doing it."
She then pulled her hand against the chain until the silver burned deep enough to make what she did next cost something, and pressed two fingers against the burn gathering some blood from her own wound, hissing as she did. She saw Stiles's eyes widen as she did, while Jackson took a step back. And then she drew the spiral on the concrete floor. "Revenge. We wanted revenge. And your sister was the main target."
Chris' jaw tensed as they looked at each other. He knew she was not lying. And somewhere she felt glad to see him suffering.
Then suddenly the hunter took out a wooden stake from his jacket. Scarlett did not looked away from the man.
"Hey." Stiles' voice, sharp as he made a step forward. "What are you doing?!"
"She's a vampire." Chris said keeping glaring at her, as she strightened her back. She would have not died crunched on the grownd. "And she confessed to killing humans." Scarlett could see the hunter gripping the stick harder, he was ready. And maybe so she was...
"No — hey—"
"Stiles." Her own voice, quiet. "Don't." She could not lie, she was greateful that he was trying to do something. She didn't deserved it. He didn't owned her nothing. She just hoped to die with him not hating her...
"If you kill her, I won't tell you where Scott is." He said it the way he said things when he had already decided. Scarlett turned to look at him with a frown, "I know where he is. But I won't say anything."
Chris' grip got thighter but he looked at Stiles. "You said you don't trust her."
"I don't." Something moved through Stiles' face. "But I don't want you to kill her. If you promise not to hurt Scott, and not to kill her — I'll tell you what I know."
Chris' body tensed. "So she can kill us after?"
Stiles turned to her. And somehow she understood what he was asking before he even said it.
"She won't kill any of you. Right, Scarlett?" His eyes were on her, firm and stubborn. "You promise."
She looked at him across the room — at the chains and the burns and the blood and the specific exhausted hope in his face that she had never been able to look at directly for very long — and said, very quietly, "I promise."
Chris made a gesture.
The hunter holding her arms released the chains.
She hit the floor before she had finished understanding that her legs weren't working properly, the silver's effect taking longer to clear than she'd expected, and she caught herself on both hands and stayed there for a moment breathing.
"The Alpha is going to the Hale house," Stiles said, his voice carrying across the room to Chris with the flat certainty of someone who has made a decision and is done second-guessing it. "That's where your sister is keeping Derek. And if I'm right, he found a way to let them find him. So Scott must be there too."
"Let's go."
The room emptied fast. Scarlett stayed where she was, on the floor, getting her legs back under her by degrees. She heard the door, the footsteps, the particular sound of hunters moving with purpose.
She looked up.
Stiles hadn't moved.
He was standing where Chris had left him, looking at her on the floor, his hands clenched at his sides. She couldn't believe he had helped her. He had saved her...
Jackson broke the silence.
"There are vampires too?"
She and Stiles looked at him at exactly the same moment.
"Shut up, Jackson," they said together.